Customizing Your .Mac Homepage With iWeb

iWeb makes it easy to create polished Web sites in no time, but can you make a site that expresses your personality instead of looking exactly like Apple's templates? You bet, says Ryan Faas, and it's not hard, either.

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iWeb is an incredibly easy program to use for building polished Web sites in
no time. One of the reasons it is so easy to use is that every page you create
is built from one of Apple’s 36 templates. There is one problem: as
professional as your site might look, it will likely have the somewhat
cookie-cutter look that most consumer Web design tools or Web-based site
building options (like the original .Mac homepage offerings). In this article,
I’ll show you how to use Apple templates as starting points to build your
own customized pages.

But First...There Are Some Things That You Can’t Change

Although you can modify, move, and delete many of the template components in
iWeb, there are some that Apple has made permanent fixtures on each page. Most
notable is the navigation menu that appears at the top of each page in iWeb. You
can keep individual pages from being listed in this menu, but it will always be
part of every page. You can’t even alter its appearance. It always retains
the look that Apple built into the particular template you use.

Less obvious than the navigation menu are certain text boxes and pictures.
The standard Welcome page templates, for example, include two text boxes (one
for a page title and one for descriptive text) that cannot be deleted. You can
replace the filler text and stock photo with your own content. You can move
them, resize them, and modify them in any other way you like. But you cannot
delete them.

All the iWeb templates include at least one item that you cannot delete. In
some ways, this makes sense because deleting it might mean creating a blank
page. You can identify these undeletable items easily because when you select
them, the square handles on their edges (that you would use to resize them)
appear gray—as opposed to the white handles on items that can be deleted.

You can work around undeletable text boxes by simply deleting the text that
they contain. Visually, it does not appear on the page if you do this (though
iWeb will still render them as elements on the page).